My First Day Of Putting The HTC Flyer To Work

Yesterday I received the HTC Flyer, which is a new Android tablet that Best Buy has just started selling in the United States. Like the Samsung Galaxy Tab, the Flyer has a seven inch screen and does not run the tablet-optimized version of Android called Honeycomb. Instead, the Flyer runs Android 2.3.3 along with the HTC Sense software that includes social media integration. Today is the first full day that I spent using the Flyer, and it has held help very well to my use. HTC provides a number of widgets that you can use to tailor the Flyer for how you want to use it, so one of the first things that I did was move the widgets around. I like that I can quickly move between calendar, email, and contacts by simply swiping between home screens.

HTC provides an alternate to the stock Android Contacts app that it calls People. People consolidates information from Google and Facebook, much like Windows Phone does, but it doesn’t spread it into different sections. When you open a contact card for someone who has a Facebook account, you can see their Facebook status updates and photos right in one spot.

In some ways, the Flyer is basically an Android phone with a seven inch screen. So far all of the apps that I have tried work, but some display a little differently, like the Facebook app that you see in the screenshot, where the home screen doesn’t display across the entire screen. All of the different sections like the News Feed do display properly, and I like seeing the extra information a large screen can display. It is an absolute joy to browse through Twitter using the Seesmic app on the Flyer.